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Page 39
It has become the most pressing duty of the State, in face of the great
change that has so rapidly come over our natural increase, to declare
that the procreation of the unfit shall cease, or at least, that it
shall be considerably curtailed and placed among the vanishing evils,
with a view to its final extinction.
CHAPTER X.
WHAT AN�STHETICS AND ANTISEPTICS HAVE MADE POSSIBLE.
_Education of defectives in prudence and self-restraint of little
avail.--Surgical suggestions discussed._
For the intelligent mind, which I assume has already been impressed with
the importance of such an inquiry, I think I have set forth the salient
truths with sufficient clearness, but holding that a recitation of
social faults, without a suggestion as to social reforms, is not only
useless but mischievous, I shall endeavour to show not only that the
situation is not hopeless, but that science and experience have, or will
reveal means to the accomplishment of all rationally desired ends, and
that it remains only for intelligence to enquire that sentiment may move
up to the line so as to harmonise with science, with justice, and with
the demands of a growing necessity.
These questions of population are not new. More than two thousand years
ago, many of the wisest philosophers of all the centuries meditated
deeply upon the tendencies of the population to crowd upon subsistence,
and in many ages and many countries, the situation has been discussed
with serious forebodings for the future.
In all ages thinking men have regarded war with aversion, yet with peace
and domestic prosperity other dangers arose to threaten the progress of
the race, and as the passing generations cried out for some remedy for
the ever pressing evils, thinking men have been proposing measures
somewhat harmonising with the knowledge or the sentiment of the times.
Whether we are wiser than our ancestors remains an unsettled question.
The old Greeks faced the problem boldly. There were two dangers in the
minds of these ancient philosophers. There was the danger of
over-population of good citizens, and there was the danger of increasing
the burden good citizens had to bear by the maintenance of defectives.
However good the breed, over-population was an economic danger, for,
said Aristotle, "The legislator who fixes the amount of property should
also fix the number of children, for if the children are too many for
the property the law must be broken." (Politics II, 7-5.) And he further
declares (ib. VII. 16 25) "As to the exposure and rearing of children,
let there be a law that no deformed child shall live"; and the exposure
of infants was for years the Grecian method of eliminating the unfit.
A century ago "Parson Malthus" dealt with over-population without regard
to the fitness of individuals to survive, and he advised the exercise
of moral restraint expressed in delayed marriage, to prevent population
pressing on the limits of food, which he maintained it invariably tends
to do. After the high souled Malthus, came the Neo-Malthusians, who,
although they retained the name perverted the teaching of this great
demographist, and some Socialist writers of high repute still advocate
the systematic instruction of the poor in Neo-Malthusian practices.
The rising tide of firm conviction in the minds of present day
sociologists, that the fertility of the unfit is menacing the stability
of the whole social superstructure, is forcing many to advocate more
drastic measures for the salvation of the race. Weinhold seriously
proposed the annual mutilation of a certain portion of the children of
the popular classes. Mr. Henry M. Boies, the most enlightened analyst of
the problem of the unfit, in his exhaustive work "Prisoners and
Paupers," urges the necessity of effectively controlling the fecundity
of the degenerate classes, and he points to surgery, and life-long
incarceration as the solution of the problem. Dr. McKim, in an
exhaustive work on "Heredity and Human Progress," after declaring that
he is profoundly convinced of the inefficiency of the measures which we
bring to bear against the weakness and depravity of our race, ventures
to plead for the remedy which alone, as he believes, can hold back the
advancing tide of disintegration. He states his remedy thus:--"The roll
then, of those whom our plan would eliminate, consists of the following
classes of individuals coming under the absolute control of the
State:--idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards and insane
criminals, the larger number of murderers, nocturnal house-breakers,
such criminals whatever their offence as might through their
constitutional organization appear very dangerous, and finally,
criminals who might be adjudged incorrigible. Each individual of these
classes would undergo thorough examination, and only by due process of
law would his life be taken from him. The painless extinction of these
lives would present no practical difficulty--in carbonic acid gas we
have an agent which would instantaneously fulfil the need."
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